InterGuru writes: "The New Scientist notes that Wall Street traders are frustrated with the limitations caused by relativity.

EVERY microsecond counts in stock trading. The New York Stock Exchange handles a third of the world's stock trading — around 22 billion messages a day. But NYSE Euronext, which operates the exchange, wants it to get even faster.

Slashdot has already noted the construction of a faster transatlatic cable. It seems however that even light is not fast for the casino that is now Wall Street.

"The speed-of-light limitation is getting annoying," Andrew Bach, head of network services at NYSE Euronext, told the European Conference on Optical Communications in Geneva, Switzerland, last week.
With global markets currently in turmoil, it might seem a strange time to worry about the speed of trades, particularly when automated trading was implicated in the stock market's May 2010 "flash crash". But traders still want their computers to receive trading data and place orders instantaneously. And customers will go elsewhere if a rival is faster.

As much as I'd like to believe neutrinos could be used for practical communications, I don't think the technology is there yet. Isn't the only way to emit enough neutrinos to be detectable is to use a (big) nuclear reactor? Modulating the output on the order of microseconds would be kinda tough. And aren't the only viable detectors of neutrinos (very) large expensive detectors (like Super Kanimode or whatever) that rely heavily on statistical analysis to interpret their result?

The reference to neutrinos was meant to be satirical. Even if neutrinos were practical to use and the recent measurements of the speed of neutrinos are upheld, their measured excessive speed is so small as to be of no use for trading.

Now that I think of it, If neutrinos could be modulated and the modulation detected they would be very useful even at the speed of light. They are not slowed down by the medium, as light is slowed down in a a glass fiber cable. Furthermore they travel is a straight line between two points on the Earth's surface, where cables can only travel on the surface.